https://www.project-syndicate.org/commen...ey-2020-03
Its really inexcusable that our leaders have let China get so dominant in the medical fields.
"...Last year, Li Daokui, a prominent Chinese economist, suggested curtailing Chinese API exports to the US as a countermeasure in the trade war. “Once the export is reduced,” Li noted, “the medical systems of some developed countries will not work.”
That is no exaggeration. A US Department of Commerce study found that
97% of all antibiotics sold in the US come from China. “If you’re the Chinese and you want to really just destroy us,” Gary Cohn, former chief economic adviser to US President Donald Trump, observed last year, “just stop sending us antibiotics.”
If the specter of China exploiting its pharmaceutical clout for strategic ends were not enough to make the world rethink its cost-cutting outsourcing decisions, the unintended disruption of global supply chains by COVID-19 should be. In fact, China has had no choice but to fall behind in producing and exporting APIs since the outbreak – a development that has constrained global supply and driven up the prices of vital medicines.
That has already forced India, the world’s leading supplier of generic drugs, to restrict its own exports of some commonly used medicines. Almost
70% of the APIs for medicines made in India come from China. If China’s pharmaceutical plants do not return to full capacity soon, severe global medicine shortages will become likely...."
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China could shut down the world's medical systems
